As Gulf oil wealth flows to all corners of the globe — backing mega mergers, propping up economies and upending the world of sport — moves by a key member of Abu Dhabi’s ruling family have positioned him as one of the world’s most influential dealmakers.
Over the past few months, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan has gained control of the largest sovereign wealth fund in the United Arab Emirates, expanding the assets he oversees to almost $1.5 trillion. He’s proceeded to bankroll billions of dollars in deals via an expanded empire of private and state entities. Drawing in titans of finance such as Rajeev Misra and billionaire Ray Dalio, Sheikh Tahnoon — one of Abu Dhabi’s two deputy rulers, the UAE’s national security adviser and brother to its president — has sought to invest in everything from technology to finance, with varying degrees of success.
Known to be a fan of Brazilian jiu-jitsu, cycling and chess, Sheikh Tahnoon now helms two wealth funds, the region’s most important private investment firm, the country’s largest lender and its biggest listed corporate. That’s made him the defacto business chief of the wealthy Al Nahyan family, with access to seemingly endless reserves of cash in OPEC’s third-largest producer — an unusual amount of financial firepower even in the oil-rich Persian Gulf.
“The UAE leadership has recognized its most important source of statecraft is financial,” said Karen Young, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. “It has the economic means to secure itself, to project power and to shape the politics around it in ways that it could never achieve with its small size or military power alone.”
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